T.C. Boyle Stories

I needed a book to sustain my wait times during some months when I wouldn’t have time to check out other books.  I wanted to read a proven author because I couldn’t afford to switch to another book that didn’t pass the “Rule of Fifty”.  I first read a book by T.C.Boyle over six years ago.  My mom recommended his novel The Tortilla Curtain because it was set in the west San Fernando Valley (SFV) and I happened to be living in the western SFV at the time.  The Tortilla Curtain subtly refers to stores, streets and people where I lived.  I later learned that T.C. Boyle also used to live in that area.  Overall, I found the story depressing, overdramatic, and unbelievable.  It had an interesting premise but seemed to just blow everything out of proportion, embody the mountains made out of molehills, and push Murphy’s Law to the extreme.  My mistake was taking it all too seriously, also the mistake of many of the characters.  But I didn’t realize that for a while.

A few years later I was looking for audiobooks and I picked out A Friend of the Earth that’s told partially in the first person.  This novel didn’t take itself as seriously despite some extreme circumstances.  I actually liked how it jumped back and forth between different points in time.  The characters were a bit more likeable especially as they aged.  I then listened to Boyle’s collection of short stories from 2000 or 2001 called After the Plague.  He sets his stories in very interesting settings.  Many are set in the L.A. area.  Some are set in the fictional “Peterskill, New York”, a proxy for Boyle’s original hometown of Peekskill in upstate New York.  Most of the stories are not very realistic but make for entertaining reading because he has such a wild imagination.  I then read his 2003 novel Drop City because part of it takes place in Alaska.  But I didn’t like this book as much as the others because I couldn’t relate to or even like the characters much at all.

My respect for Boyle was restored with his 2005 collection of short stories called Tooth and Claw.  Before reading it I saw him at the celebration for USC’s 125th birthday where he is professor in the English Department.  It was in a small room at the library.  His grown daughter introduced him and he wore a yellow blazer that looked trendy.  For the presentation he answered questions and read one of his stories (more on this later).  Then we lined up to have him sign our books.  He signed my copy of Tooth and Claw “To David, con amistad. -T.C. Boyle” and I chatted with him briefly.  He seemed very fun-loving and easygoing and very different from his overly serious and suffering characters.  I subsequently enjoyed reading Tooth and Claw.  He has a way of taking a possibly real situation and twisting it into extreme proportions.  One story, “Jubilation”, is about the life and dysfunction at a housing development near and affiliated with a major theme park.  He got the idea when he saw such a development near Disneyworld in Florida.  One year later I read his 2006 novel Talk Talk, a suspenseful thriller about identity theft.  Much of the novel takes place in the fictional town of San Roque, CA that I believe is a proxy for Boyle’s current hometown of Santa Barbara, CA.  Of all his books I’d read to that point, I liked this one the best.

I figured I couldn’t go wrong reading his anthology of short stories called T.C. Boyle Stories.  It came out in 1999 and combines his previous four collections of short stories: Descent of Man (1978), Greasy Lake (1985), If the River was Whiskey (1989), and Without a Hero (1994).  It also includes a few additional stories.  Prior to being included in collections, most of Boyle’s stories appear in magazines such as Esquire, Harpers, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Playboy.  Sometimes they don’t appear in collections until many years after they appear in the magazines.  In T.C. Boyle Stories, a year is given at the end of each story and I believe it is either the year he wrote it or the year it appeared in a magazine.  The years ranged from 1971 (“Drowning”) to 1997 (“Juliana Cloth”, “Mexico”).

The book separates the stories in to three sections: I. Love, II. Death, and III. And Everything in Between.  They more or less fit these categories though they also encompass many other themes.  They’re often about everyman heroes or anti-heroes, usually male, who get into situations that are more than can handle.  The situations that Boyle creates are as wide as his imagination.  Some involve real life figures from history or the present such as President Eisenhower (“Ike and Nina”), Jane Austen (“I Dated Jane Austen”), Idi Amin (“Dada”), and Jacques Cousteau (“Rapture of the Deep”).  These stories are fictional and usually told from the point of view of a fictional minor character such as the cook on the Calypso in “Rapture of the Deep”.  Many stories include elements of the fantastic such as “The Miracle of Ballinspittle” where the main character’s sins are paraded out in front of him (e.g. kegs of all the alcohol he had drank rolled by).  “Bloodfall” is a rather disturbing story about a group of people living communally when blood suddenly falls from the sky like rain.

I found things with which I could identify in some of the stories.  In “Without a Hero” the first person protagonist mentions owning a Bianchi all-terrain bicycle.  I own a Bianchi hybrid bicycle.  This same story shows its age (written in 1990) when it mentions shopping at I. Magnin, Robinson’s, and the May Company.  “The Hat” features a character called Mae Mae, also the name of my wife’s cousin.  “Peace of Mind” mentions Canoga Avenue, the street I lived on in Woodland Hills.  I read a couple of stories around the time events similar to them occurred in the news.  Hurricane Ike hit Houston around when I read “Acts of God” about an old man surviving a hurricane.  Two days before Election Day, November 4, I read “The New Moon Party” about a presidential election and the aftermath.  There were so many stories in the collection that I had actually read one before.  “Mexico” is also in After the Plague.  Another story, “Back to the Eocene” was the one that T.C. Boyle read at the book signing.  He read it well and made everyone laugh when doing the voices of the 5th graders.

I think my favorite story in the collection is “Sorry Fugu” about a chef struggling to impress a very critical food critic.  I enjoyed the descriptions of the food, ingredients, and cooking process.  I could relate a bit because I’m an amateur restaurant reviewer.  I also liked “The Overcoat II” because it takes place in communist Russia and I studied Russian History for one semester in high school.  The passage about jokes at the office is just too funny.  “John Barleycorn Lives” is also pretty good and features the historical figure Carrie Nation.  Some of the stories have especially interesting premises.  “Sitting on Top of the World” is about a forest ranger that lives in a mountaintop.  “Hard Sell” has an image consultant meeting with the Ayatollah in Iran.  “The Champ” is about competitive eaters and was written long before the celebrity competitive eaters we hear about today.

Every story is interesting in its own way.  Once I started reading one I found it difficult to stop.  I found some more humorous than the others such as “The Hector Quesadilla Story”.  Others are more dark and disturbing such as “Greasy Lake” and “King Bee”.  Very few stories end happily as this is Boyle’s custom.  He uses different styles.  Some are told by first person narrative, others by third person.  A few don’t give all the details and others have multiple narratives.  Some such as “Greasy Lake” and “The Fogman” seem like they could be autobiographical.  Boyle also likes to showcase his wide vocabulary.  When I read “The Arctic Explorer” I actually knew what an eructation was (a burp or belch) because my wife had learned the word in her medical terminology class.  I couldn’t stop reading yet I found going through all 697 pages a bit draining.  All the irony, sarcasm, and satire got to be a bit too much.  When I did finish after two months of reading, I felt like I had completed a long journey.  The first stories seemed like a long time ago.  It probably would have been better to read the smaller collections of stories included in this larger one.

Overall, I prefer his later stories to his earlier ones.  The later ones don’t seem quite so serious.  Despite the great variety many stories do have some similarities.  Most main characters are in their 30’s or 40’s, single or divorced, and male.  They all drink alcohol and usually smoke and they often feel like something’s missing in their lives, or they have to do something, or there’s a problem they have to solve.  Usually, the way they go about filling the void, doing something, or trying to solve the problem makes things worse or leads to unexpected consequences.  I couldn’t relate to the characters in most stories, but that’s probably a good thing.  I did find many stories entertaining.

I don’t suggest reading the entire book straight through.  Read the shorter collections or read part of T.C. Boyle Stories and take a break before reading more.  The stories that are funny for some can be disturbing for others.  I did get some sense of how Boyle’s writing developed over 27 years and insight into his way of thinking.  Some say he presents the failings of his generation: the Baby Boomers disillusioned by the Vietnam War and later materialism.  I think he just likes to mess with his readers, shake them out of their comfort zone while entertaining them, and give them a perspective they wouldn’t normally have or consider.  Yeah, the stories disrupted my “Peace of Mind” but I stuck with them “On for the Long Haul” from “Greasy Lake” to “Mexico” like an “Arctic Explorer”.  By the end I was “Beat” but for T.C. Boyle I still have “Respect”.